Can I stop an A/B split test?

I have an A/B subject split test running that appears to be a tie between all subjects. I'd like to stop it and dig in to the results to see who's clicking through before I choose a subject line. Can I stop the split test?

Good morning! It sounds like you want to pause the split test and then be able to kickstart it again after viewing the results so far. It isn’t possible to pause a split test.

I can see why you’d want to — Your split test’s results so far are pretty close to one another. I’m curious: You say you’d like to see who’s clicking. How would you base your winning subject line decision on this? Are you close enough to your subscribers that you can spot the heavy hitters?

That’s more of a curiosity on my side, so the short answer here is that you aren’t able to pause a split test without selecting a winner first, which will send that variation to the remainder of contacts.

Thanks Katie. If I could see that most customers clicking the signup link in the email were associated with one of the subject lines then it would inform my decision and function as a tie-breaker. I'm not even sure I can do that though, but I know I can't figure it out at all unless I can stop the split test and look at the click through rate.

Now that I write that, I'll bet that even if I could see the click through rate I wouldn't be able to tell which subject line was associated with which clicking. Am I right?

That’s right — You’re really only sending one mailing, with one set of response results, and that mailing happens to have three subject lines (like a three-headed monster with one heart). So the response stats, like the click-through rate, wouldn’t be distinct for each subject line.

I know you spotted and added your use case to this idea about including the click-through rate for each subject line, which would be a cool capability. We’ll keep you posted about our plans in that conversation. :)